Reviews
Sarah Kent
Michael Craig-Martin was the most playful and provocative of the conceptual artists. His early sculptures are like visual puns, a play on the laws of nature. On the Table, 1970 (pictured below right), for instance, appears to defy gravity. Four buckets filled with water stand on a table; so far so ordinary. But the table has no legs and is suspended from the ceiling by ropes and pulleys.Normal relationships are reversed; by acting as a counter balance, the buckets hold up the table rather than the other way round. On the Shelf, 1970, consists of 15 milk bottles lined up on a shelf tilted at a Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Modernism is us. Today. For the past two decades plays by Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter – which once upon a time bewildered their audiences and gave critics apoplexy – have become big West End hits. The avant-garde is now commercial. The incomprehensible is our reality.How so? By casting celebrity stars in the main roles, and emphasizing the humour. So the current revival of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot – which premiered in Paris in 1953 and then got a London production a couple of years later – features Ben Whishaw, a national treasure since he voiced Paddington in the film series, Read more ...
David Nice
All five finalists in the Leeds International Piano Competition, at which Pavel Kolesnikov was one of the jurors, should have been given tickets, transport and accommodation to hear his Wigmore recital the evening after the prizegiving. Not that supreme imagination can be taught, but to witness the degree of physical ease (and freeflowing concert wear) that allows all the miracles to happen would be a good lesson to so many tension-racked pianists, including some of Kolesnikov’s peers.As always, the connections he made in his programme were surprising, though obvious once you thought about it Read more ...
Robert Beale
The first piece by Grace-Evangeline Mason I heard was six years ago, a simple song in a multi-composer “Manchester Peace Song Cycle” performed at the Royal Northern College of Music when she was studying there.It was striking because of its eloquent melody and evocation of child-like joy. Subsequent experience has confirmed the impression that she writes music that immediately communicates, that is often about something, rather than abstract (and she’s not afraid to tell us that), and that it does what it says on the tin.Her ABLAZE THE MOON, premiered by the BBC Philharmonic in the 2023 Read more ...
mark.kidel
Apart from being one of Britain’s greatest songsmiths of the past 50 years, Elvis Costello – from the early adoption of the rock’n’roll King’s first name – has produced a form of naked self-expression, blurred by intricately-tailored pretence. Though this is “art”, never artifice.The geek of old has gone through several phases of metamorphosis – though something of the original persona remains, albeit battered and matured. While he was fast and furious in youth, a New Wave phenomenon, he has found a more measured stride, and the irony that was played down is now something Elvis revels in Read more ...
stephen.walsh
We were of course lucky to get this new WNO Rigoletto at all. If it weren’t for the fact that, in the end, the company’s wonderful chorus and orchestra couldn’t wait to get back to doing what they do best, and accepted a modest glow of light at the end of the tunnel that would barely have registered on the light meters of most union negotiations, the company could well have been dark for many months, perhaps for good.Watching and listening to them in this staging by the company’s new co-Director designate, Adele Thomas, it was incredible to think that our noble rulers would take the slightest Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Somewhat amusingly, the sign outside Birmingham’s O2 Academy on Saturday stated that the evening’s entertainment was to be provided by “Frank Carter and Members of the Sex Pistols”. In a way, it was a bit misleading, suggesting that the original and greatest British punk band was going to be backing a relative newcomer rather than that they were touring with a new front man and, no doubt was more driven by John Lydon’s lawyer than what was going to happen on stage.So, with the former Johnny Rotten having taken a hissy fit and leaving the fold, the Sex Pistols rocked up in the Brum to play the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
White Roses, My God isn’t a Low album. It couldn’t be. Mimi Parker, Alan Sparhawk’s wife and partner in Low, died in November 2022. And despite Low’s many musical twists and turns, Sparhawk’s public return to music sounds nothing like any of Low’s outings across their 13 studio albums, the first of which was issued in 1994.The opening track is “Get Still.” Its melodic bed comes from a keyboard line played on what sounds like a pre-digital synth: perhaps a Korg or a Mini-Moog. A glitchey beat provides underpinning. The vocal combines a treatment similar to that heard on Neil Young’s 1982 album Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As the name of a music genre, new jack swing was coined in an issue of the Village Voice dated 18 October 1987. Writer Barry Michael Cooper was profiling producer, songwriter and member of the R&B trio Guy, Teddy Riley when he created a tag exemplifying the mix of R&B and hip-hop which had hit super-big in 1986 with Janet Jackson’s Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis-produced Control. Riley was on the same wavelength, and Cooper recognised a groundswell.Swingbeat was interchangeable with new jack swing, but it was the latter which caught on. So When TLC and SWV emerged in 1992 they were swiftly Read more ...
Robert Beale
“Mozart, made in Manchester”, the project to perform and record an edition of the piano concertos plus all the opera overtures, seemed a distant destination and an unlikely marathon when Manchester Camerata embarked on it eight years ago.But with Jean-Efflam Bavouzet and Gábor Takács-Nagy sticking with it through thick and thin (including Covid), they got to the final tape last night at the Stoller Hall in Chetham’s School of Music. The hall didn’t even exist when it all began: the first performances were at the Royal Northern College of Music. But the idea has slowly taken flight and Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Why do production companies think the world needs yet another reconstituted TV drama involving famous people in infamous situations? Newspapers and non fiction books already do a great job of telling these stories of intrigue and scandal: why is a TV adaptation a viable improvement?This is especially true when key moments of the action necessarily take place behind the closed doors of Fortress Firm and are effectively unknowable. All the production team can do is hire a decent writer to indulge in gifted speculation while they come up with a budget for securing the cream of the acting crop Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“Let the train take the strain”, as the old advertising slogan urged us. The train in this six-part drama has to soak up a whole world of strain, as it’s taken over by cyber-hijackers who demand a huge ransom before they’ll consider relinquishing their technological grip.The train is called "The Heart of Britain", and it’s the night sleeper service from Glasgow to Euston. Some viewers may detect resemblances between this and Idris Elba’s Apple TV plane-drama Hijack, or (in a more rail-orientated vein) Snowpiercer, but Nightsleeper does at least have the distinction – well, kind of – of being Read more ...